Intel Ivy Bridge-E slated for September 2013 launch

The launch window for Intel’s Ivy Bridge-E processor line has been narrowed down to September 2013. Information previously available targeted Q3, but VR-Zone has revealed a leaked slide from Intel giving a more precise date for the new HEDT (high-end desktop) line of processors, the i7-4820K, i7-4930K, and i7-4960X.

Ivy Bridge-E CPUs are based on a 22nm lithography and are a die shrink of their 32nm Sandy Bridge-E predecessors. Current SB-E owners will be happy to hear that these new CPUs use the same LGA 2011 socket.

Comparisons between the Core i7-4960X and the Core i7-3970X show the new generation performing between 5-10 percent faster across the board in benchmarks. Performance gains are purely from improvements in efficiency, as the number of cores has not increased.

VR-Zone reports that the top tier i7-4960X actually contains 20MB of L3 cache and eight cores, but has one-fourth of its resources disabled for the consumer version of the product. A full eight core/20MB cache processor will be sold under the Xeon brand, but will undoubtedly go for a much higher price than $999.

If Intel maintains the same pricing structure as SB-E, the three units will sell for around $1000, $600, and $300-350 respectively. The feature list for the new lineup includes 40 PCI-Express lanes (Gen 3.0), DDR3-1866 memory support, Hyper Threading, and Turbo Boost 2.0. All three processors come unlocked out of the box.

Intel Ivy Bridge-E HEDT Lineup

CPU

Cores/Threads

Base Clock

Turbo Clock

L3 Cache

TDP

Core i7-4960X

6/12

3.6 GHz

4.0 GHz

15 MB

130W

Core i7-4930K

6/12

3.4 GHz

3.9 GHz

12 MB

130W

Core i7-4820K

4/8

3.7 GHz

3.9 GHz

10 MB

130W

Along with information about Ivy Bridge-E comes a few leaked details about the Haswell-E HEDT platform, codenamed “Lituya Bay.” Haswell-E is slated for the first half of 2015, will be based on the namesake 22nm architecture, and will again remain compatible with LGA 2011 boards. However, a new chipset will be implemented in motherboards to allow for native DDR4 memory support.